A jewel-bright hardness

I haven't touched on the extremely unpleasant business of trying to reconcile why you're going through this process. Obviously, it demands a lot of emotional maturity -- or you could do what I did, and have quips ready and waiting when any sort of raw human emotion revealed itself.

My doctor's go-to recommendation was support and therapy groups for women fighting or otherwise effected by breast cancer. They were exactly what I had imagined -- a circle of chairs filled with bald women in headscarves or wigs. It was a huge bummer. Although we were going through similar treatments, I felt completely out of place. What was mainly addressed in conversation was the lack of control and feeling of self when undergoing cancer treatment. Because I was an extremely early detector, I had none of that -- I had the profound luxuries of certainty and time. My concerns and fears were still valid, but very much minimized in the presence of more troubling immediacies. 

So I kept it to myself. It felt all too Kafka-esque for my liking. I figured there was going to be a month or two of extreme unpleasantness, and then reconstruction, and finally all this would be behind me. No need to to have dramatic "woe is me" moments -- just get through it. Except that method didn't let me actually confront and make peace with that was going on. 

It was at my most scared that I was at my wittiest. Someone would express concern, and I always had a quip ready and waiting to return the volley. I became snarky and insincere, minimizing my anxieties in the hopes that they would disappear that way. I developed this hardness that I was not proud of. Any time a vaguely human emotion would rear its head, I'd have some sort of snappy answer prepared. I never had to interact with it that way. I never had to admit to myself that I was terribly scared and uncertain. A quip was the best defense. 

I only started allowing myself to feel things after my first procedure. When there's nothing to do but sleep and take pain meds, there's a lot of time to think (albeit not the most lucid thoughts). I say "allow" in that because the depth of my duress felt so foreign that they couldn't possibly be mine. I had to realize that because I felt them, they inherently were mine. And that was OK. My jewel-bright hardness was allowed to soften, and that was OK. I was OK.